E. Alan Hartman column: Kaizen can help form new ideas
Our University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh College of Business alumni from the 1980s remember learning Japanese-based business principles in the classroom such as total quality management and lean manufacturing. The method now embraced by leading organizations, and discussed in our classrooms as well, is the Kaizen method of continuous improvement.
Kaizen, which in Japanese means change (kai) to become (good), has its roots in a Japanese concept for incrementally changing business using small group activities. Local organizations have embraced Kaizen and its five elements: teamwork, personal discipline, improved morale, quality circles and suggestions for improvement.
Several faculty members have participated in Kaizen events and teach students how they can be used. After attending a meeting of university, technical college and business leaders last summer, I accepted an invitation from Dan Ariens to participate in a Kaizen event at the Ariens Co. in Brillion.
Ariens was kind to allow me to participate; I learned a great deal and appreciate their willingness to allow me to share my experience.
The Ariens' events focused on the key Kaizen factors that arise from the founding elements ?elimination of waste and inefficiency.
Our week began with a meeting of leaders from eight teams assigned to improve a process or a product. Each team had three to eight members. The Ariens-appointed Kaizen leaders presented the process or product the team was to improve, and the baseline data collected in the previous week. Each team had to complete five Kaizen implementations, five quality improvements and five safety improvements.
I was assigned to Snow Cell 10 led by Scott, an Ariens leadership intern. Ariens seeks potential leadership talent from hourly employees. Those chosen for the program spend six months with a management mentor.
My first task had me paired with Tim, an experienced Kaizen team member. We did time studies of one of the assembly positions. The assembler did not follow the steps in the order prescribed on our list, so we created a new one and timed each of the steps in the new sequence. It took several hours to gather enough data to give us a good sense of what the assembler was doing.
Our team reconvened and completed paperwork to show the time spent on each assembly position, the steps taken by each assembler and an overall calculation of how long it took to assemble one snow blower. The results showed one position was always under the time expected while two others were higher. In addition, there was a fair amount of waiting between work stations due to the positions taking longer.
In the afternoon, team leaders reported on what they had accomplished. The other team leaders and the Kaizen leaders commented on each report.The comments were quite pointed ?everyone understood what was being recommended.
Kaizen day one was complete, and I left feeling impressed with the discipline and focus of the teams.
E. Alan Hartman is dean of the College of Business at the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh.
